The incident happened in the Dharampur village where local children and devotees spotted something written in English and Arabic over the entrance of the temple. They apprised the local panchayat chief of the matter, who reported the same to the police.

When police arrived, they found that “ISIS coming soon” was written on the walls of the temple. They took help of local people who could read Arabic or Urdu to decipher the rest. It was found that the part written in Arabic script was “la ilaha illallah” i.e. “there is no God but Allah” which is first part of the Islamic Shahada.

The police is investigating the case and nothing is known about the culprits yet. Some reports suggest that such scribbling was also left on a house opposite the temple as well.

The concerned temple is situated at Kalka-Shimla national highway and is known as Manasa Devi temple.

Looking at the pictures, it appears that stencils were used to print these slogans, perhaps to hide the handwriting of the culprit, which could have been a clue in the case.

The incident has left the locals worried as the state has largely been peaceful and such incidents were not reported earlier. However, it comes on the heels of arrest of a person named Abid Khan, who was a resident of Bengaluru but was hiding in Himanchal Pradesh with a fake identity.

Abid was reported to be in touch with ISIS operatives and he himself wanted to join the terrorist organisation. He was living in Himachal for last five months under a fake Christian identity and was arrested from a Church.

Although there is no proof currently available to directly link the two incidents, this surely has sent the alarm bells ringing both among the residents as well as among the security agencies.

Two people were arrested after local residents complained to the police that they were distributing pamphlets which had the Islamic State symbol and a message titled 'ISIS Shaitan'.

Two persons hailing from Kerala's Kasaragod district were arrested near Panaji late on Monday while canvassing for a convention of Salafi Muslims scheduled to be held in Karnataka's Mangalore later this month.

The arrested persons have been identified as Ilyas and Abdul Nazir. The duo were arrested after local residents complained to the police that they were distributing Kannada-language pamphlets which had the Islamic State symbol and a message titled "ISIS Shaitan". According to police sources, the pamphlet is being analysed by top police officials as the content of the pamphlet canvasses for a convention of Salafi Muslims due to be held in Mangalore from January 9-16. Police is also checking the mobile number mentioned on these pamphlets. "They have been booked under sections 107 (breach of peace) and 151 (preventive arrest) of the Criminal Procedure Code. They have been sent for medical examination at the Goa Medical College," police official said.

This is a worrying precedent, to some degree I feel like Indians have been a bit complacent about ISIS just because only a handful of Indians have joined it till date. There definitely does seem to be more pull for ISIS within India than we would like to admit. I remember that one picture of 10-15 South Indian Muslim guys posing together in black ISIS t shirts and doing the finger gesture, it was all over the news and internet, wonder what happened with that.

This is a worrying precedent, to some degree I feel like Indians have been a bit complacent about ISIS just because only a handful of Indians have joined it till date. There definitely does seem to be more pull for ISIS within India than we would like to admit. I remember that one picture of 10-15 South Indian Muslim guys posing together in black ISIS t shirts and doing the finger gesture, it was all over the news and internet, wonder what happened with that.

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Those guys got off with a warning I think. A *lot* more has happened since then. Secret cells busted, people running away to IS lands via SL and Afghanistan.I dont think there are many people who take this seriously, with the usual secular media not giving much importance (you know, according to them Sanghis are a bigger problem than IS ). Thats why I wanted to open this thread, but looks like it will be shutdown.

It's particularly worrying with the number of people in the south being caught for this in Kerala and TN, though there are probably a lot from other areas that havent been discovered yet (Bengal is a prime region, in fact a guy who was trying to setup a cell in Tirupur in my state came from bengal, and even got immigrants from other areas to settle down, while recruiting locals).

The Indian Security Apparatus has improved a loooooooot after 26/11....

And There are many people who criticize demonetisation but it had Surely hit the Naxals and the NE militants...

Most of the terrorism deaths are in Naxal Regions, NE and Kashmir and often the casualties are security forces.... While I don't see a solution for Kashmir Ever... The Rest can and should be solved in the upcoming years... I like this administrations Pro-Active approach here...

As Far as Daesh is concerned.... The solution here is the responsibility of parents to keep an eye on their kids... And for the Kids to themselves understand that violence is not good...they should rather dream of IIT or NIT...These kids are systematically brainwashed by "certain people" ... Though The Intel. Agencies regularly track them.. Sometimes going undercover... Or Surveilling them online... But The Intel. Agencies can only do so much...

It's upto these Kids to avoid being Radicalised....

Well anyway... This is just my opinion...

I strongly believe (hope too) that the current administration will improve the security situation.... I would give them another term just for Improving the security situation ....

Nimisha, alias Fathima, is from a Hindu family in Thiruvananthapuram. PIC/ABP News

Sources in the Indian intelligence agencies have revealed that the 22 persons from Kerala who had gone missing between June and July last year are said to be in an ISIS camp in Nangarhar Province in Afghanistan. Nangarhar province is close to the country’s eastern city of Jalalabad and the ISIS camp in the region has approximately 3,000 terrorists.

Sources say these persons went to the terror group’s training camp in Nangarhar via Dubai and Abu Dubai in the Middle East. The 21 people, including six women and three children, are originally from Kasaragod and Palakkad districts of Kerala. The number of the missing persons, all under the age of 30, well-educated (indeed exempting the children) and belonging to middle and upper middle class families, is officially said to be 21 but could be even more.

Sixteen of those missing are born Muslims while two men and three women are converts into Islam from Hinduism and Christianity. Relatives, friends and neighbours of the missing Muslim youth vouch that they had never shown signs of being overly religious nor had they shown any interest in routine religious affairs.

All used to be well-mannered young men and women who had opted for professional studies and acquired degrees in engineering, management and IT. Not even a petty case exists against any of them in any of the police stations anywhere. All had left their homes and villages within the past two months and had told their parents and families that they were going to Sri Lanka for religious studies or leaving for Mumbai or somewhere else in search of jobs or on some other reason.

The first seeds of suspicion that they might have joined the Islamic State were sown after A Hakeem, one of those missing from Thrikkarippur in Kasaragod, sent a WhatsApp message saying, “From hell, I have reached heaven where I can lead an Islamic way of life.” That was about 11 days ago.

Then the doubt spread that they could have gone to Syria or Afghanistan to join the terror force. Intelligence agencies are said to have received credible information that many of them had reached Islamic State camps and some of them could have used Teheran, Iran, as their transit point. However, the State and Central agencies are still either unable or reluctant to officially confirm that they have joined the Islamic State.

The details of the missing people are interesting. The following list is of those missing from Padanna and Thrikkarippur areas in Kasaragod:

Ijas, a doctor who used to practice in a hospital at Vadakara in Kozhikode district. Ijas is said to be one of the two chief organisers of the group and their long journey presumably to Islamic State camps.

Ijas had taken his wife Rifaila (who on last Sunday told her father over voice-mail that they have not turned extremists) and their one-and-a-half-year-old son along with him. The woman was carrying her second child when they left.

Ijas’s brother Shiyaz, a management degree-holder left home with his pregnant wife Ajmela, a physiotherapist.

PK Ashfaq, a cousin of Ijas and Shiyaz. Ashfaq, son of a Kasaragod Muslim doing business in Mumbai, had left with his wife Shamsiya and two-year-old daughter.

Hafeezuddin, son of Hakeem. He had got married just four months but “luckily, he has not taken his wife along,” says Hakeem.

Muhammad Mansad

Abdul Rasheed Abdullah, son of an NRI, holding an engineering degree. Rasheed, said to the captain of the team, is an engineer and was working with the local Peace International School on a paltry salary compared to the money he was earning when he was in the Gulf.

Rasheed has taken his wife Ayisha, a Christian named Sonia who embraced Islam just before their marriage. They have taken their little daughter Sarah along with them. Ayisha holds BTech and MBA degrees.

Marvan Islamil, another well-qualified Muslim.

Feroze Khan, a BCom degree holder, who, according to Intelligence sources, was taken into custody from Mumbai last Sunday.

Those missing from Yakkara in Palakkad, the district from where one of the first cases of a youth who had possibly joined the Islamic State while working in the Gulf came to light, are all young people who had converted into Islam from other religions. Those missing are two young brothers, who were born and brought up as Christians and their pregnant wives, one a Hindu and the other a Christian, who embraced Islam. The brothers are well-educated. They are:

Essah, who used to be Begson Vincent in his earlier avatar.

Essah has taken his wife Fatima, originally a Hindu named Nimisha from Attukal, Thiruvananthapuram, who was a BDS student in a Kasaragod college when she converted and married the converted young man.

Essah’s brother Yahia, originally named Bestin.

His wife Mariyam, a Christian girl named Merin Jacob originally hailing from Thammanam in Kochi. She was working with an MNC in Mumbai when her life changed.

The cases of Palakkad and that of Rasheed, who married Sonia alias Ayisha, have sparked a heated debate in Kerala. Mini, Merin’s mother, says she was brain-washed into embracing Islam.

Bindu, mother of Nimisha alias Fatima, had fought a court battle with a habeas corpus petition to get her daughter back, but the court allowed her to go with her husband as she was no more a minor. Mini then petitioned directly to none other than R Sreelekha, IPS, the Additional DGP in charge of Intelligence, Kerala but that produced no result.

Even after the marriage of her converted daughter to a converted Christian, she used to call up and call on her and the last meeting was in early May. Then she said she was going to Sri Lanka with her husband for business purposes. Since then, there is no information about her and what came later are the reports that she and her husband were among the group that might have joined the Islamic State.

Reports since Sunday spoke of an MBA-holder from Chirakkal, Kannur, who had been working in Saudi Arabia for the past 10 years, going missing under mysterious circumstances since July last. He had disappeared with his wife and two children. The last message the parents got from him was that they were going for Umrah.

Another report on a person’s mysterious disappearance came from Kanjikkode in Palakkad district. Shibi, a 31-year-old Muslim who was a classmate of Essah. Another young man, who had converted into Islam a year ago came from Angadippuram in Muslim majority Malappuram district.

The parents of all those who have left – presumably in order to live in the “divine country” (of the Islamic State caliphate) – say that they had never shown any big interest in religious affairs but had developed the habit of being extremely religious, first showing the signs of being driven into Salafism and then more obscurantist Wahhabi thinking. “My son began to grow a beard and in some time it reached the chest level. He would want us all to grow a beard. He would object to our involvement in business, banking, etc. According to him all these were un-Islamic. No TV, videos, newspapers. We thought that this could be just a passing phase but it now seems that it was bigger than that,” said the father of one of the missing persons.

According to relatives of the missing persons, they never wanted to be part of the religious customs the Muslims here, mostly Sunnis, had been following. “They were well beyond that as though their minds were riveted on the rustic life that is said to have existed in Dammaj in Yemen once upon a time. I thought it was some kind of Sufism that they were being drawn into. Or plain mental diversion,” said another parent. “I am sure of one thing. If they have joined the Islamic State, or if they want to join (investigators are unwilling or unable to draw any conclusion), they haven’t been drawn into it by its guns, swords, the brutal human rights violations, the violations of women of other cultures and sex trade that we keep on reading in newspapers. They were looking for some kind of life only ascetics can lead, I think. Still, I don’t believe they have gone to join the terror group,” he adds.

As an indication supporting his thinking, Rifaila, wife of one of the pack’s leaders, reportedly sent a voice message to her father on Sunday claiming that the stories spreading in India about them were not truth. She said she and her husband were about to join jobs and had already arranged an apartment to live in. But she did not mention where she was sending the message from. Many psychologists in Kerala are of the opinion that the development could be part of a transformation – mostly temporary – taking place in the minds of the youth who had been living in the ‘boring shadow” of richness and luxury and they could have been feeling an urge to go Back to Nature, as some Islamic philosophers have said.

Another problem, according to them, is that god has become an online entity these days and instead of content the new generation, going through the superficiality of technology and management in education are looking for words and not content and messages being given by the Quran. “It is online Islam,” says a professor specialising in West Asian studies. But what contradicts the theories on affinity to “qualified asceticism” are the reports that at least some of them have been listening to recordings of speeches by preachers like Zakir Naik.

Does India monitor mosques and madrassas and shut down radical ones the way France and Germany have begun doing? If they don't already, that's one very important thing to begin doing in order to counter ISIS and radicalization.

Serious cleanup needed. Kerala, West Bengal, Assam, Karnataka-Maharashtra border, Uttar Pradesh. Need to infiltrate at a community level for actual meaningful intelligence. And then people need to disappear.

For years, the growing following and influence of ultra-conservative Islamist ideology in parts of Europe including Belgium, France and even Scandinavian countries has been talked and written about. Sometimes attacks on small scale were ignored as petty crimes or for reasons of political correctness, these were pushed under the carpet as Europe tried hard to project its image as a multi-cultural and multi-religious project where people of all faiths were free to follow and propagate their religious beliefs.

Until the 7 July, 2005 London attacks, Britain loved to show its openness to ideas and people even if they as UK residents preached hatred and opposition to Westminster style of democracy. A radical Egyptian cleric Abu Hamza was treated virtually as a state guest as he preached radical doctrine to Muslims in London and UK. Many in India will remember the freedom given to Khalistani Sikh organisations and Tamil Tigers by British authorities. Radical groups were allowed to spread hatred in the name of freedom and free speech.

If the London attacks forced British authorities to wake up to the threat posed by such groups and the ideas they propagated, the November 2015 attacks in Paris seem to have woken up mainstream political parties in Europe to such a threat. Suddenly, Belgium is viewed as a weak link and liberal democracies have realised the danger of giving "unfettered” freedom to Islamic groups.

Flirtation with Saudi Arabia saw the rise of fancy mosques across the continent where many clerics preached a return to "pure Islamic ideals” as espoused in the Quran. Puritanical Wahabi ideology was and continues to be propagated from many of these mosques across the world, where clerics are not only sowing seeds of hatred against liberal democracies but also against Shia Muslims.

The last few years witnessed Salafis grow and spread with great speed across the globe as well. Their brand of Islam that considers all ideas and practices of Muslims that are not in conjunction with the Holy Book as heretical has taken root across the continent, among a growing population of young Muslims who are being told day in and day out that they must return to their roots.

Salafis are more conservative and do not accept many of the beliefs of Sunni Muslims, and they are more aggressively opposed to any cultural influence impacting Muslim practices. They are greater opponents of mysticism, and reject ideas of saints and their shrines as unacceptable. This makes South Asian Islam as nothing short of heretical. Men and women must not mix with non-Muslims, give up any form of worship such as visits to Sufi shrines and abjure any act that could be construed as un-Islamic.

Saudi Arabia's brand of Islam that it has successfully marketed to millions across Asia, Africa and now Europe through generous financial payoffs and donations, has impacted younger population of Muslims in parts of India for last few years.

India has also over the years seen more and more Muslims, particularly the younger population, get attracted to preachings of ultra-conservative clerics. This is not to say that they are supporters of radical groups like the Islamic State and Taliban. But, the change in the complexion of discourse within sections of Muslim population, their responses and growing assertion of some people that there is need to abandon centuries old brand of South Asian Islam are a natural consequence of years of government indifference, some complicity and failure to recognise what/how Saudi money was actually contributing to a change in the way many Muslims think.

A few months ago Oman flagged concern about growing radicalisation of thousands of Muslim workers from India in the Gulf country.

The growing pressure of Wahabis to push their conservative ideology has disturbed sections of Sunnis in India and a few months ago some of its leaders sought government intervention to check its spread.

The Sunni Wakf Board fears that Wahabis could take over a majority of shrines and 'dargahs' of Sunnis allowing terror groups like IS inroads into the country. Wahabi clerics and preachers have had little difficulty in getting visas to address and influence congregations across the country.

Salafis in Bengaluru

In the last few years Salafis have managed to take root in large parts of the country including Benguluru which boasts of 42-odd Salafi mosques that preach ideas that are repugnant to centuries-old Islamic traditions in India. That it was not easy to set up Salafi mosques due to opposition from existing Islamic groups in Bengaluru is well acknowledged by the Salafi trust on its official website. "There were physical fights, social boycott, warnings and torture for the above members for bringing the Salafi methodology in their locality” before they managed to build Salafi mosques, states its official website.

Initial opposition later dissolved and they managed to expand their influence in the city and among its young population,

I recall meeting a young Muslim in Benguluru some years ago who was forthright in his criticism of his mother and sister's "un-Islamic” acts of visiting Sufi shrines and praying at mazars of saints. He also minced no words to state his opposition to Shias terming them as non-Muslims. This young educated man was a regular at a Salafi mosque in Koramangala area, home to wealthy people such as Infosys and Wipro chiefs.

Kerala has for many years seen a subtle shift in the way women dress up, use of headscarves, and even design for new mosques. In fact, preachers from Muslim Brotherhood have had access to Kerala in last several years where institutions like the Islamic Mission Trust have used foreign funding to set up educational and social institutions to widen their reach and influence.

Salafi organisations like Kerala Nadvathul Mujahideen have been around since 1950s but post-1992's Babri Masjid demolition and the turn of the new century, they have witnessed growth and radicalisation of minds that is a matter of concern.

Al-Jamiya Al-Islamia in Malappuram (north Kerala) with well-defined objectives to provide leadership for teaching, training and research in Arabic Language and Literature has emerged as a new institution that preaches conservative Islam. Saudi Arabia pledged millions of Saudi Riyals to them ostensibly for constructing an arts and science college building. In 2003, it became a university "and a dream come true” when a celebrated international scholar Sheikh Yusuful Qardawi declared it a university. Qardawi, now in exile in Qatar, belongs to Muslim Brotherhood. According to international websites he is known for his militant religious rulings and political commentary in support of acts of terrorism and repression of women.

It also pledged one million Saudi Riyal to the construction of a nursing college. A similar amount was also pledged to Palghat Mujahideen Arabic College Committee in Kerala for the purpose of extending an existing medical college and the Karuma hospital building.

In eastern Uttar Pradesh, Saudi Riyals were donated to establish a madrasa building and a vocational centre for girls in Mirzapur and Siddharth Nagar. Schools and colleges with Arabic names prominently stick out across western UP today. Attempts to also link Muslim identity with Saudi Arabia, reminiscent of what happened in Pakistan, need to be addressed politically and ideologically.

UP, Kerala and Karnataka examples merely illustrate how ultra-conservative ideas alien to Muslims in India are now getting greater attention and following among sections of Muslims because of inadequate political understanding and response. Political parties in India that claim to be flag-bearers of secularism need to look beyond short term electoral gains to formulate a response to Wahabis and Salafis gaining mindspace among sections of world's third largest Muslim population.

Does India monitor mosques and madrassas and shut down radical ones the way France and Germany have begun doing? If they don't already, that's one very important thing to begin doing in order to counter ISIS and radicalization.

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Not sure about mosques, but we control all temples for sure

Would be surprised if they didnt have some form of control, perhaps the govt is keeping quiet, as it is a possible to play politics on this. Ideas about about having govt vetted teachers and syllabus at madrassas get thrown around quite frequently. Doval was talking about countering terrorist islam with nationalistic Islam in one of his speeches.

Most of the cases atleast at this point have been radicalized from outside of India or via the internet. Internet is perhaps one their biggest recruiting spots - The ShamiWitness types, the guy was a gateway to IS training and recruitment. Some of them are brainwashed by even muslim run volunteer ngos, (like in the Kerala one). While mosques need to be watched, there are plenty of other ways available to radicalize some one.